Le char des Séraphins fidèles,
Semé d'yeux, brillant d'étincelles,
S'arrêta sur son triple essieu;
Et la roue aux traces bruyantes,
Et les quatres ailes tournoyantes
Se turent au souffle de Dieu.
* * * * *
Adorant l'Essence inconnue
Les Saints, les Martyrs glorieux,
Contemplaient, sons l'ardente Nue,
Le Triangle mystérieux.
Though Lamartine in his first works lingers lovingly over terrestrial scenes, he yet constantly soars in hymns into the celestial ether where, as he tells us, sacred poetry dwells, crowned with palms and stars.
Lord Byron, who, like De Vigny, writes a poem on the Flood (Heaven and Earth), is also partial to ether, though not such theological ether, as a surrounding; but he loves wilder scenery, and it is as the painter of the sea that he finds his true sphere. He lifts poetry out of its ethereal environment and deposits it in the fresh, salt element.
Chateaubriand, then, hardly succeeded in proving what he wished to prove, the superiority of Christianity to the purely human sources of poetic inspiration. Each time he attempts to do so he exposes or condemns himself. I adduce one other striking example of this.
His hero, Eudore, sailing up the Gulf of Megara, with Ægina in front of him, Piræus on the right and Corinth on the left, sees all these towns, which once were so flourishing, lying in ruins. A Greek fellow-passenger is moved to tears by the remembrance of his country's ancient glory, and we are told in touching words how the individual feels as if his individual griefs disappeared when he is brought face to face with the great, overwhelming calamities which crush whole nations. Then Eudore says: "Such an idea seemed to be beyond my youthful grasp, and nevertheless I understood it, whilst the other young men who were on board did not. What caused this difference between us? Our religions. They were pagans, I was a Christian."
Chateaubriand plainly desires to impress upon us that such an appreciation of natural surroundings and the lessons taught by them is a special possession of the Christian, of which the pagan, as pagan, is destitute. But his position is considerably weakened by our knowledge that the utterance referred to by Eudore is nothing more nor less than a translation from a famous letter written by Sulpicius to Cicero,[5] that the sentiments in question are actually the sentiments of a pagan. We can hardly be expected to accept this as a proof of the pagan's want of poetic feeling. But the trait is typical. Throughout all Chateaubriand's writings dogmatic religion is constantly proclaimed to be in possession of certain supernatural beauties and qualities of which nature, as nature, is devoid; and yet everything in that religion which is of poetical or moral value is simply an expression of human nature. As Feuerbach puts it: "Every theory of God is, in its essence, a theory of human nature."
Passing this half audacious, half conventional work, Les Martyrs, once again in review, we cannot deny that the part of it which directly treats of the supernatural world of Christianity is a failure. Indeed, Chateaubriand himself openly confesses as much in his Memoirs. The parts which have any real value are the purely human parts, one of which we shall presently criticise. It was inevitable that the doubt and indifference of the century concerning the supernatural world should set its mark on the work of an author whose own religious enthusiasm was as much a matter of deliberate intention and determination as Chateaubriand's.
Chateaubriand was not a conscious hypocrite, but he deceived himself. Proof of the manner in which he himself was affected by the reading of his Martyrs is to be found in that refined and charming autobiographical work, which all agree in accepting as reliable—Les Enchantements de Prudence, by Madame de Saman, otherwise Madame Allart de Méritens, the last woman whom Chateaubriand loved, and who loved him in return.
This lady tells how, in the summer of 1828, they used to meet at the Pont d'Austerlitz and dine together in the Jardin des Plantes in a private room. "He ordered champagne, to dispel my coldness, as he said; and then I sang to him Béranger's songs—Mon âme, La bonne vieille. Le Dieu des bonnes gens, &c. He listened as if enchanted." She paints these meetings in the warmest colours,[6] and she mentions that it was one of Chateaubriand's greatest pleasures to listen to her reading passages from his works. (Both in this book and elsewhere Madame de Saman shows herself to have been possessed of excellent literary taste.) He especially loved to hear her read his descriptions of landscape. "But sometimes," she says, "to affect him more profoundly, I produced Les Martyrs, and read the speeches and thanksgiving hymns of the confessors, or the thrilling prison and torture-chamber scenes. Then he could not restrain his tears. One day he began to weep; I continued to read; he sobbed convulsively; I still went on, and when I came to the passage which tells how Eudore secretly offered to sacrifice himself in order to win the salvation of his mother, who had been too weak in her love for her children, he could contain himself no longer, and burst into a passion of tears and sobs. It was a case of emotions returning to their source. His highly strung nerves gave way. Completely overcome, exhausted with weeping, he expressed his gratitude to me, said that he had never experienced such rapture, called me by all the sweet names men give to the Muses, told me that I was beautiful, more especially praised my eyes and their expression, imagining in the ardour of his passion that he had never seen anything like them before." The lady was at this time about twenty, Chateaubriand exactly sixty years old.
This quotation shows us that even such frigid passages in Les Martyrs as the speeches of the white-robed elders had really been felt by the author himself. We are touched by this young and noble woman's enthusiastic admiration for an old man, and the man himself rises in the reader's estimation from the fact of his being able, even at that age, to win the love of such a woman. But it is in strange surroundings that we come upon this outburst of strong emotion, a thing so rare with Chateaubriand that it may almost be called unique. Champagne, the songs of his political and religious opponent, Béranger, caresses and declarations of love, fits of weeping and sobbing over Les Martyrs, followed by more love-making! What an environment for the epic of orthodoxy! What an excess of human passion in a Seraphic poet, a former minister of state and pilgrim to Jerusalem![7]